A New Approach to Relieving Stress & Anxiety (and Improving “Emotional” Health) | with Nick Wignall

About Episode

Nick Wignall is a board-certified clinical psychologist specializing in cognitive and behavioral psychology. Nick also writes a weekly newsletter called The Friendly Mind, which offers simple. practical advice for emotional health and wellbeing.

With the endless supply of challenges this year has delivered to us, including recession, the rise of AI, and the Hollywood strikes (to name just a few), anxiety has been on the rise and we’ve never been more desperate for solutions. Nick offers us an abundance of solutions to this evergreen topic, addressing anxiety in all aspects of life including the workplace.

In our conversation, Nick and I dissect what anxiety really is and peel each of its layers to help you identify how to deal with it. Nick gives us some great tips on how to work with your anxiety so you can still live your life and even make important decisions despite feeling anxious. Lastly, Nick reveals the benefits of training our minds to worry at specific times of the day and more importantly, how to do it.

Transcript

Zack Arnold: I'm here today with Nick Wignall, who is a board certified clinical psychologist. And he specializes in cognitive and behavioral psychology. You also now work with organizations to improve their culture and employee well being also a dad of four this not a typo I've got two I can't imagine four. And you're also the creator of The Friendly Mind, which is a weekly newsletter with practical advice for emotional health and well being cannot imagine a more useful person to help with the massive amounts of anxiety and uncertainty and abject terror in the world of the entertainment industry right now. And those that do creative work than talking to you right now, Nick. So Nick, it is an absolute pleasure to have you with us today.

Nick Wignall: Thanks Zack. It's a pleasure to be here.

Zack Arnold: Yes, I'm very much looking forward to it. In the first place that I want to start is actually talking about how, when we were scheduling you a little bit of insider baseball, Debby and I were having a conversation a week or two ago. And we were going through and figuring out like this, like just, you know, total disclaimer this week, I've got five back to back to back to back to back to back podcast interviews. And I said to Debby, like, do you think that there's like one or two that maybe we can move because it was really overwhelming. And I don't want to be overwhelmed and beyond the thought of me being on unprepared on a podcast, I just, I can't even sleep at night. This is I'm an overachiever. I'm a recovering perfectionist. So we talked about why I don't know. Maybe we move it to, you know, October November? I don't know, like, is it still relevant? And I said, Debby, I don't think that by October that the problem of anxiety will be solved, I am pretty confident that anxiety will still be around in two or three months. So there's no reason we can't push it. But that's all the more reason for us to record this when we record it. Because this problem is not going away. And it's getting any it's not it's not going to get any better anytime soon. So that's kind of the place that we started and why I think it's so important for you and I to be talking today. There's a whole host of strategies, and mindsets and all the work that I want to get into. But first, what I actually want to learn about you more is what it is that you did before as a psychologist and why you chose to maybe make the career pivot that you did because career pivots. That's kind of a topic du jour in my community. So I actually want to learn a little bit more just your background, what it is that you specialized in. And now why you've made this transition?

Nick Wignall: Sure. Yeah. So I started off my career I got I graduated as a clinical psychologist got out of grad school, and immediately went into working in private practice doing therapy with folks and I, almost from the beginning, I specialized, almost entirely in anxiety, I did about 80% anxiety, and then another 10 15% Insomnia, just very related. anxiety and insomnia tend to go hand in hand. And so for about six years, I just all day, every day I was doing I was working with people who struggled with all sorts of forms of anxiety, whether it was social anxiety, panic attacks, you know, OCD type stuff, just generalized anxiety, health, anxiety, all this kind of stuff. Perfectionism, you mentioned perfectionism earlier. And so that was my bread and butter, I just did that constantly. And I love you know, I love working with anxiety, because and insomnia, both that they both have this quality of, they're extremely, they're excruciating. I mean, they're just awful, like when you're living with them, but compared to a lot of the other types of issues, that people have mental health kind of struggles that people have, whether it's, you know, eating disorders, or trauma, or depression or bipolar disorder. As a field, we're actually really good at understanding how anxiety works, and how to overcome it. There's a lot of confusion. But there's a lot more clarity on the ground level about how to actually work through anxiety in a really structured, effective way. And so I was just, I'm pragmatic, like, I love stuff that just works. And so I love helping people who, you know, who had really difficult struggles, but that I could really make a difference with. And so anyway, I did that for a long time. But pretty soon after starting to practice it, I started getting frustrated, because a lot of the stuff I talked about and help folks with it applied to people who who weren't necessarily in the category of they have a clinical mental health disorder. So when you say they have an anxiety disorder, technically what that means is, you have so much anxiety to such a degree, that it severely impacts your life, you're not able to work, you're not able to like do kind of daily functioning type stuff. I mean, it's really impacting you. But anxiety is a completely normal human emotion and experience. Like we all get anxious, from time to time about various things. And I thought it's just kind of silly and frustrating that we have all these great kind of insights and tools for dealing with anxiety that are only being directed toward kind of clinic people who have extreme kind of clinical cases. And so I just started kind of writing about these principles and tools that I was learning. But I thought like, I bet you other people who maybe don't have anxiety, that's that extreme to where they need to be in therapy all the time, or they have extremely high levels, I think it would still be really helpful. And so I started blogging, basically, I started writing articles and had a for, I think, just about six years now I've written weekly newsletter every single week for six, six years, coming up on six years now. And it's proved to be there seems to be a lot of interest in it. So I was doing a lot of that. And then I got a sorry, I'm rambling on here, I'm trying to wrap this up.

Zack Arnold: Don't worry, this is all great. Don't Don't Don't cross yourself off, keep going.

Nick Wignall: I got an email out of the blue, from a gentleman who was had worked in corporate consulting for a long time and was an entrepreneur and started a couple companies, and was thinking a lot about kind of emotional health and well being and how sort of underappreciated that is, in the work world. I mean, we spend eight hours a day, five days a week, a lot of times more than that, at work. And it's a place that, to a large extent, doesn't really think about or consider those things. And that's like really strange, if you just think about it from that perspective, spending that much time, you put that much kind of energy and passion and in education, all kind of stuff into your work. But there's in that context, there's almost no thinking about, you know, well being emotional health. Yeah, how to culture, things like that. So anyway, he was interested in starting a company that helped other companies with these types of issues. And so I, he and I, and another, another guy, we kind of messed around for about a year and decided we had something that was worthwhile. And then we launched a company to go in and work with other companies who, who cared a lot about healthy cultures, well being of their employees, that sort of thing. And so we, we do a variety of things. But I'm sort of the, the one with kind of the research, formal psychology background on the team. And so we develop curriculum and do programs with folks to address those types of issues. So that's my kind of day job. I do that full time. And then I continue to do my writing and blogging and all that on the side and the occasional podcast experience,

Zack Arnold: So so from the way that you tell that story, what an easy, seamless, smooth, flawless transition, I'm sure that it was right. From I've spent my whole life climbing this ladder being told, Oh, you're interested in psychology, great. That's a very reputable secure, very predictable field, you do all this education, you get your your degree, you have your practice, congratulations, now you're an adult, and you're a professional. So I would imagine from that to what you do, now, there had to have been a few bumps in the road that created your own anxiety.

Nick Wignall: Yes, I'm glad. I'm glad you brought it up. So you know, it's so anxiety was definitely in there. And I'll talk about that, especially the transition out of practice and into the corporate world. But before that, there was actually another emotion that I think was really insert another kind of difficult emotion that was really instructive. And that was frustration, anger, almost sometimes, which was with how, you know, just seems strange to me that, that when it comes to emotional health, there's, the resources are basically the Self Help section at Barnes and Noble. And then there's like psychiatrists, and psychologists office. And there's almost nothing in between. But what's interesting is, that's exactly where most people are. Most people have, let's say, anxiety issues, or anger issues, or whatever it is that they need a little more than a self help. I mean, self help, books are great, like, I'm a self help junkie myself, right. But sometimes people need a little bit more structure a little bit more nuance a little bit more, how does this apply to me in my life, than just a book, right? But they probably don't need, you know, hours of therapy every single week with a psychiatrist with a psychologist, like, that's overkill, too. So there's, there's this really weird gap where there wasn't much offering kind of in the middle, but I, my experience was that's exactly where most people are. And it just kind of annoyed me with my field, that we didn't think more about that huge segment of the population, who and that's why I'm more and more I use this term emotional health rather than mental health is very clinical has a lot of clinical associations. But emotional health, what I hope to convey with that is that, you know, our, and we'll talk more about this, but our relationship with our emotions is just a really profound thing. And it can be healthy or unhealthy kind of depending on our circumstances. But that's a significant thing. Even if you don't meet criteria for kind of a clinical diagnosis or even if you're, you know, life isn't completely falling apart. There's all this work we can do on our on our emotional lives is really, really beneficial. So I was just gonna irritate it. And so that was the impetus to get into the blogging and the kind of teaching, I do a lot of teach a lot of workshops and courses and stuff online. And I just love doing that I love kind of teaching people about emotional health and well being and the mind and psychology and how it works. So this is gonna be a theme, like paying it paying attention to your emotions, not necessarily thinking of them as these annoying or dangerous enemies that we need to get rid of like, I'm angry, I shouldn't be angry, like, stop. No, I was like, I'm probably angry for a reason. Like, what what if I kind of followed through on this. And that led me to this whole world of blogging and teaching and writing online, which I have just loved. Now, so there was that I was doing that. So let's do both of those. I was writing and doing my practice for six, seven years. And then I had this opportunity out of the blue. Well, not totally out of the blue, it was because this guy had found some of my writing, and I was like I liked I liked what this guy thinks. So I think there's something in that, right, this kind of putting yourself out there. That was never my intention with writing or blogging. It wasn't like a career move. But there's something really powerful and something very kind of 21st century I think about, well, how do you how do you open yourself up to cool opportunities? workwise it's probably not I mean, resumes are fine, but like spamming monster.com, with with resumes is not the most efficient way. Right. But there's something really powerful, I think about figuring out what's unique to you. And part of that, again, I think it goes back to those emotions, those strong emotions that you feel those are often clues to what you're really passionate about. And so I think that's, that can be really powerful. Yeah, so putting that stuff out there. And that led to this, this new gig, which produced a tremendous amount of anxiety when I was considering what I put in, you know, six, seven years in grad school. And then like another six years, and in practice, like doing this psychology thing, and this guy's like, come do this new business with me this new startup that will you know, most startups fail. It's risky. It's totally different, like, not something I've really ever, ever trained for, in a lot of ways. So yeah, I was I was nervous as hell. There were definitely a lot of nights where I was up in the middle of the night, you know, to am like, thoughts buzzing around? Like, should I do this? Should I not do this? I have a young family, I had three little kids at that time. And you know, funnily enough, it was, I was starting to kind of spin him I mean, this is we'll talk more about when we talk about anxiety, one of the hallmarks of anxiety is it's a, it's a very heavy problem. Like, our tendency, when we get anxious is that we kind of go in our head, and we start worrying and swirling around mentally, and which is understandable, because I think a lot of life problem solving gets us pretty far, like a lot of our work, it depends on being good problem solvers, and fixing things. But there's certain times when that process actually makes things worse, sleep is a great example, right? To worrying yourself to sleep doesn't work. But it was my wife, actually, who kind of pulled me out of it. And, and I was talking to her, she was being a very good listener, and she was just listening, and I'll tell my concerns and worries. And she just said, you know, what, like, this kind of an opportunity doesn't come along very often. I think you should go for it. And she said, It's not the complete end of the world. Right? If you it would be hard to kind of get into a new practice and go back to doing it would be difficult, but no one's gonna die, right? No, we're not gonna be like living under a bridge, you know, down by the river. And it would be okay. And but mostly she she wasn't, it was interesting. She wasn't like, alleviating a lot of my concerns, so much as saying, look at all the upside over here. Let's put like, let's folk and so I thought that was really, that was really amazing of her. And I think that's another there's an insight there of when it comes to anxiety, we can unpack the phone more if you want. But the tendency with when we're feeling anxious is to, I need to stop feeling anxious before I can make a decision. Like I'm thinking about do I leave my career, not just my job my whole career, and start this new thing. I had a lot of anxiety about that. In my kind of assumption. Even though I'm a psychologist and I talk to people with anxiety all day long, my default way of thinking was, I need to be less anxious before I can make a decision. And what my wife sort of nudged me to was like, no, like, you can make a good decision despite being anxious. And actually, maybe that's the way to be a little bit like less anxious, is to not feel kind of like you're a prisoner to your anxiety, but to make decisions with it on board. Anyway. Sorry, that's a bit long winded but but hopefully that gives you a sense of some of the I mean, I'm me I'm a professional psychologist helps people with anxiety and I've got plenty of anxiety myself.

Zack Arnold: I can relate to that as a coach that helps people, especially creative minds deal with time management, productivity, impostor syndrome, all these other things. What I've learned the most about people that are both coaches, therapists are kind of in that general realm. You generally choose a specialization where you can give people advice all day long that you really need to be telling yourself or Right, so thinking that I'm an expert at this thing, and I'm gonna give you all the expertise, it's the opposite. I struggle with all the things that I teach my students, but I'm so hyper obsessed with learning how to solve them, they benefit from all the things that I learned. And when it comes to therapists or coaches or otherwise, the ones that that bother me are the ones that pretend like they don't have the same problems. But I think one of the things I love about the work that you do that I resonated with immediately, is you sharing and being vulnerable and open and honest like to be somebody that's a quote unquote, expert in managing anxiety, like, Who are you to say that you suffer from anxiety? Shouldn't you have it figured out? Right? So I appreciate that. One thing that I'm curious about is that if you were transitioning from I have spent this in entire my entire adult life, preparing for this one professional career path, I've invested all this time and money in my education and building this practice. And I want to become an underwater basket weaver, massive identity crisis. And who am I even going to become? My guess is that you didn't experience that at that level? Because you're using a lot of your expertise and just changing the way that you're using it. But I presume you still experience some impostor syndrome?

Nick Wignall: No, I mean, I experienced it every single day. I mean, I'm working with people who have MBAs and who have been in the corporate world and consulting world and CEOs and people who have completely different skill sets that I am totally inadequate to even being in the same room if we're comparing sort of chops on, on different things. And that's, yeah, I literally feel it every single day. But one thing I hope that I'm fairly good at, is again, going back to that point that a, it's all this stuff is normal, like anxiety is not a disorder. So generalized anxiety disorder is a disorder, right? Panic disorder is a disorder. Anxiety is a perfectly normal human emotion that we all have, right impostor syndrome. That's not a technically a disorder. It's a term somebody made up, right. But being anxious and comparing yourself to other people, is a complete like human beings have been doing that for as long as human beings have been human beings. Like that's what we do. We're very social creatures. We're always attuned to and thinking about, where do I stand in relationship to other people? That's not a bad thing. You know, one of the piece of advice I hate someone my little soapbox things, like get on my soapbox here.

Zack Arnold: I have a whole room of soap boxes, you're in a safe space right now.

Nick Wignall: All right. You know, there's, there's this idea out there that we shouldn't care about what other people think. And I just think that is such nonsense. Like, of course, we should care about what other people think, right? Let's you're a psychopath, like you're gonna you're gonna care about what other people think. And mostly, that's a pretty good thing, can you go too far with it, of course, right, just like anything else. But the idea that you shouldn't care at all about what other people think, is crazy. And it's just going to put more pressure on yourself. In an already difficult situation, if you've got a lot of anxiety about going into a new field, right? You having anxiety, and then telling yourself, oh, I shouldn't feel anxious, we'll get that's not gonna lower your anxiety, that's gonna double your anxiety. Now you have anxiety about anxiety, right on top of your anxiety. And there's this funny sort of the sort of physics of emotions, how they work is if you've got a difficult emotion, like anxiety, and then you add another difficult emotion on top of it. So let's say you get you get anxious about being anxious or you get, you get judgmental about being anxious. Two units of anxiety, plus two units of anxiety does not equal four units of anxiety, right? It's like two to the fourth power or something, they get exponential emotions get exponentially bigger, when you compound to them. Right? When you get angry at yourself for feeling sad when you get anxious about being anxious. So I think it's really, it's really, really important. Whenever you're struggling with those emotions, it's something I try and remind myself especially when I feel myself spinning out and really getting kind of impostor syndrome, or stressed out or whatever it is, is that the first thing is always to acknowledge like how I'm feeling like yes, I am feeling anxious right now. I'm kind of feeling like an impostor. And that's normal. I don't like it. Right? It feels crappy. really prefer not to feel this way. But just because it feels bad. It doesn't mean it is bad. There's all sorts of things in life that don't feel good, right? Working out doesn't feel good, like eating your broccoli doesn't feel good. Like there's all sorts of things that don't feel good, but we know are good for us. And for whatever reason, I think culturally we've gotten to this point where you know, people talk another little like soapbox things, people talk about negative emotions, or like anxiety, anger, sad, all these negative emotions and how you need to cope with your emotions and like, tamp them down and like, no, emotions are not negative. You thinking about your emotions as bad things is negative, right? But emotions themselves, they might be painful. They might be pleasurable. They might be something you want. They might be something you don't want, but they're not bad and dangerous. No emotion can hurt you But you're gonna get into a lot of trouble. If you start being judgmental of your emotions. If you start being intolerant of your emotions, thinking I'm anxious, I shouldn't be anxious right now. I'm getting so frustrated, like I shouldn't be frustrated right now. Like, I should just be cool with the situation I have. It's great. I should be grateful for it. What? So I think that's, that's really in those situations where you're planning, maybe you're thinking about a big move into something that is maybe you're not becoming an underwater basket weaver, but maybe you're doing something that's, you know, only loosely related to what you're doing now. Like, yeah, you're gonna have a lot of imposter syndrome. It's okay. It's normal. Everybody would, whether they admit it or not, everybody's going to. And I think acknowledging that and just sort of validating that, and that sense of like, this is valid. I don't like it, right. I wish it wasn't the case. But it makes sense. It's valid, it's normal. There's so much power just in that simple move, right? It's so simple, but it's so easy to overlook that and to forget that. But I just think it's so helpful.

Zack Arnold: Well, I want to continue this theme of bringing many cell boxes into the conversation. Now you understand why I make this now, you know, I record for 90 minutes. Because this is where you really get to the meat of things. I hate all the short pithy sound bites, and I got to get it all in 30 minutes. Because that's that's not where you get to the truth. Right? And, and I love the only thing that I'll tell you, you don't need to correct yourself or stop yourself at all, because this is all fantastic. And I love the soap boxes. And I love you just you know, what you're saying is, quote, unquote, rambling. And I think what came out of this that's so valuable, that is even helpful for me, and I would imagine is helpful for anybody listening is this idea of labeling an emotion as positive or negative, as opposed to, it's just an emotion, and it's how I react to it. And one of the things that I talk about with my students all the time, and coming from your level of expertise, you can tell me if I'm on the right track, or completely full of shit, because I've got my own raging case of imposter syndrome, right? Like, for example, I'm thinking in my mind, well, I, I do similar things with my clients all day long, but I don't have any degrees that are on the wall. So how do I who am I to think that I know anything that I'm talking about? When it comes to anxiety, for example, where I see anxiety being incredibly useful and positive, is that it's a signal when something just doesn't feel right. And I get that all the time in my field, especially since the beginning of the pandemic, when people realize, I don't like what I'm doing, or I don't like the people that I'm working with, or I don't feel any sense of connection with the stories that I'm telling in the work that I'm doing. And that anxiety in my mind, if you're aware of it, and where it's coming from can be a really, really good thing. So an exercise that I do with my students especially and we're not doing this a whole lot right now, given the present economy. But when they're debating job opportunities, and they're thinking about whether or not Should I take it or not? Yeah, we do you know, cost benefit analysis or pros, cons lists, whatever it might be. But I asked the question intuitively, when you think about taking this opportunity, do you experience anxiety, or nerves? Because it's hard to understand the difference? anxieties, your body saying, There's something about this that is not in alignment with my values? Or where I am? And nerves is, this sounds scary, right? There's a huge difference. So I help people understand like, you run towards the nerves as much as humanly possible. That's discomfort, saying, here's the better version of you slightly in the distance. The anxiety is, there's something wrong here. So am I am I in the realm of possibility given this is what you deal with all day, every day?

Nick Wignall: Yeah. So I think high level, like what what you're bringing up is really important and very overlooked, even among professionals in my field, I think, which is how we talk about things, especially the difficult emotions and difficult experiences, actually has a profound effect on our ability to respond to them well, and deal with them. So I love this idea of thinking carefully about and making distinctions among different types of difficult experiences, right? So when you say, in your mind and your kind of framework, you've got anxiety versus nerves, right? Both are, you know, you could put them sort of in the like, fear family, right? If there's this broad category of fear based on that, you know, nerves, anxiety, panic, like whatever you want to call them. There's all sorts of kind of flavors in there. And for you, though, you've got this kind of consistent distinction of when there's a kind of, there's a kind of fear, that is my body signaling a danger, right threat here. And it's good to know that that's a specific type of fear. There's this other type of fear, right, it is what I'm going to call nerves, which is, which is actually just the anticipation of a challenge. And that in your body sort of uses the same system to deal with both of those. But if you if you can reflect you can actually see the difference between the two. But your ability to do that and to make good decisions in part is going to start with thinking Being careful about how you label and describe the experiences you're feeling in yourself. So I think that's actually really, really critical is to be careful and thoughtful about how you talk about these difficult, those bad or negative, these difficult experiences, or emotions that you're feeling, right. So technically out Pete, there's all sorts of frameworks about how people think about, like anxiety versus fear, or anxiety versus nerves or whatever it is. But I think what's important is that we, as individuals, we're thinking carefully, and we're being consistent with ourselves that we can notice there's two different things here, right? There's this system in your brain that's designed to kind of keep you safe from threats, it can be activated, if there's an actual threat going on. And that doesn't just mean like a bear is chasing you. Maybe it means you're working in like a toxic environment. And you're, you're trying to rationalize yourself, that is fine. But really, your, your kind of lizard brain actually know something that you're not willing to admit to yourself. And it's trying to tell you, Hey, this is not a good environment, you need to be you should think about leaving, right. But there's this other when we're presented with challenges that aren't necessarily dangerous, they're uncomfortable, they're scary. They're actually dangers to our survival. Well, our bodies recruit the same system to give us and, and really anxiety, fear nerves, all that underneath the hood, like in your body. It's all just adrenaline. That's really all it is. It's underneath the hood. It's adrenaline. And adrenaline is really, when you got loads of adrenaline surging through your body. It's really uncomfortable. Most of the time, if you're just sitting around, like in a meeting, and you think yourself, Oh, my God, just say something stupid, and you start getting that surge of adrenaline. It's super uncomfortable, right? But if you're, you know, if you're in your, I don't know, your city, like softball league, and it's the championships and you're going up to the plate, and you're pumped, and you're ready, like you have adrenaline to, but you're not interpreting it as a negative thing. And so it doesn't feel as bad, but it's the same stuff going on. So I think this challenge versus threat, mindset is real is a really nice way to pause and think when you're feeling some version of fear. Right? What is now I will say one more. So one more thing on this, I think that's important, when it comes to emotions, and how we, what our relationship with emotions is, I think it's important not to be either dismissive or romantic about our emotions. And what I mean by that is, I think, you know, for a long time, our culture was pretty dismissive of emotion, especially for men. I think that culturally, it was sort of like, you don't talk about that stuff, you know, or shut it down. If it's coming up, and we certainly don't want to be that, like you're, it's dangerous to avoid your emotions or not listen to them at all. On the other hand, it's also unwise I think, to be overly romantic about your emotions, and think, because I'm feeling afraid. That means something's dangerous, and I shouldn't do something. Or because I'm feeling angry, like I'm writing they're wrong. Our emotion, your emotions are your brains best guess at what's going on. So if it thinks something's dangerous, like it's gonna make you feel a little anxious, because really, that's adrenaline, and it just wants to, like, wrap you to fight or flee. But your your brain isn't always right. Like your brain makes mistakes. Sometimes, it's when it comes to anxiety, the brain very easily, can sort of misconstrue something that maybe looks like a threat, but isn't actually dangerous. So it's, it's very important to, I tell people, you always want to listen to your emotions, but you don't necessarily want to trust them either. You want to verify you want to, you want to be attuned to them, and say, Okay, I'm feeling anxious. Like, what's this about? What is this thing? Is this a threat? Is my brain trying to tell me something that maybe I'm ignoring, or not attune to maybe? which case maybe definitely, wasn't it that or is this is my brain kind of making a mistake here, and your brain doesn't make mistakes. It doesn't sound very romantic. But your brain absolutely makes mistakes all the time. And so one of the things you always want to do is, when you're making a decision in the face of a difficult emotion, like anxiety, you want to check your decision against your values, not just your emotions. So sometimes your emotions are aligned with your values. If you're hiking and a bear jumps out in front of you, and your brain says, run away, like your emotions are lined up with your values. You don't want to get eaten. So yes, you should follow that and run away. Right? But if you're considering making a career move, and it seems a little scary, but there's a good amount of stuff in the pros column to like, maybe sort of running away and avoiding looking at that. That's contrary to your values, right, ostensibly. And so, if your values conflict with your emotions, you usually want to choose values. And so we can get into that more but the bigger point is Just, you always want to filter your emotions through the lens of your values, especially with big decisions. And that we remember, we don't want to be either avoidant, or overly romantic of our emotions, there's a healthy sweet spot in the middle. That's tricky and difficult to cultivate. But there's really an art to it, and you can get better at it. When you do, the decision making process tends to get better.

Zack Arnold: Unless your value is I'm a nature lover, and it means I should hug the bear instead of run from it, then don't take any of our advice. But I you're getting right to the epicenter of everything that I want to talk about values is where I want to go shortly. But I want to go a little bit further into this idea of anxiety versus nerves and actually want to add a third here and that is overwhelm. So we've what I think is really important that we've done so far is we've we've broken apart something that for most people, I think they don't even realize there are components. And I know that the way, the way that my brain works is that it's much easier for me to understand something whether it's logically or even emotionally, if I have some sort of framework, and it's like, oh, I didn't realize that work in these different parts. If I have a not necessarily a label, but if I have an understanding of what this is, I can break it into pieces, and I can better work through it, right. And I think it's one thing for people to understand, it's not just I'm feeling all the same things, whether I'm going up to the plate, and I'm going to you know, try and win the game, versus I work with horrible people, and they treat me like shit. And they're asking me to come back for another season of this project, you know, biologically those things feel largely the same. And I want to add a third one, which is be feeling overwhelmed, because I think right now everybody feels overwhelmed, especially with all the massive changes in technology and the economy and all the these other areas where there's there's really nothing that we can grab on to and feel secure. So I guess what I want to do next is we have these three categories, anxiety, overwhelm, and we have our nerves helped me understand if I'm feeling all of these things simultaneously. What are what is the strategy or two, so I can actually use the word reflect. And I love that having awareness is so powerful reflect where I get that these exist, I have no idea how to parse them out and separate them. Yeah. What are some simple ways for me to better understand what I'm actually feeling?

Nick Wignall: Okay, great question. Big question. It's gonna involve a multi step answer. I think, because we got it, we got to kind of set the foundation. Let's do it, we got to do it. All right. So I think the first thing is, I like these distinctions of anxiety overwhelmed and nervous, like, let's, let's keep those. But I want to introduce another kind of way of dividing up what we're feeling when we're just when we got all the three of these things on board. And the reason I'm gonna telegraph The reason this is important is because the ultimate answer to your question really depends on control. What are the things I can actually control? And what are the things I can't control? That is like the secret question, I think, to answering your question, ultimately, is being able to accurate ask yourself that and get good data from yourself.

Zack Arnold: It's like you've read every newsletter that I've written in the last three months, it's eerie that you bring that up. But continue.

Nick Wignall: Yeah, so I think psychologically speaking, a really good way to think to kind of parse out what we're experiencing when we're feeling really just overwhelmed or stressed out, or whatever it is, is. There's a few important categories. There are emotions. Emotions are things like fear, anger, sadness, joy, and think about inside out the Pixar movie Inside Out like that. Those are the basic emotions, right? They are, they're their own category of thing. They're distinct. They're related to but there's distinct from physical sensations. Right? So when I'm feeling the emotion of anger, anxiety, my body is often stressed, or tensed. Right? I have a stress response. Adrenaline is like pumping through my veins, right? Maybe, maybe my fingertips are getting a little tingly, my heart rates going up, like all that kind of stuff. So that's so physical reactions, versus emotions. That's a key distinction. Right? So I might feel my emotion is anxiety. Physically, though, I'm stressed from tensed. Another critical layer is your thoughts, like the cognitive layer, anxiety and stress. They're both related. They're also both related to worry. That worry is not an emotion. Technically, you don't feel worried. Worry is something you do in your mind. It's, it's thinking about a negative outcome in the future. It's using your imagination to predict or think about negative dangerous things in the future. Okay. That's a very different class of thing than an emotion and a stress a physical response. Okay, so we've got emotions, we've got physical responses, we've got thoughts. And then the last really important one is behavior. Literally, what do you do? And so an example of the behavior Your might be crass donating, or like avoiding. Right, I'm gonna, I'm gonna avoid this conversation that I know I need to have. Or I'm gonna avoid my coaching session because I know he's going to ask me about, you know, have I done my homework on looking at a new stuff. So now, so the for our emotions, physical sensations, thoughts and behaviors. Now that's important because emotions, you have zero direct control over our emotions. There is no anxiety knob, you can like turn down, no happiness lever, you just like crank up and all of a sudden, feel good. This is really it sounds dumb, but like this is actually you'd be surprised how many times our struggles with anxiety ultimately come from a misconception that I ought to be able to control how I'm feeling emotionally right now, you cannot do it. nAd if you try, it will make it worse. Trying to control things that you can't control will always backfire when getting more of that if you want. On the other end, and this is largely true of physical responses as well, if you're just super tense and stressed out, you can't just stop being stressed. Right? You can't you can take some deep breaths, right, you can close your eyes, you can indirectly you can change your behavior, which will indirectly affect how you're feeling physically. But again, no dial in for like, tension, stress, what's going on in your body for the most part, right? So this is really important emotions, physical responses, not something you have a ton of control over. On the other hand, thoughts and behaviors, you actually do have a very high degree of control over both of those. Okay, so you can choose what you decide to do when you're feeling anxious. Do you feel anxious and immediately, like pull out your phone and scroll social media as a way to distract yourself from the anxiety? Maybe? Maybe helpful? Maybe not. But that's something you can control, you could decide not to do that. Right? You're thoughts? Right? Now this one's a little tricky. There are a certain some thoughts are not under our control. Sometimes you're just cruising around and like a thought pops in your head. And I forgot to get the name of the grocery store. Or you didn't choose to have that thought. So some thoughts are not under your control. Right? Or the thought pops into your head like, Oh, my God, like what if I don't get a job in the next month, and my savings turns out, right, you didn't choose to think that thought it just popped into your head. However, whether you continue to think about that is absolutely something you have control over. A lot of our thoughts are under our control. And this is when it comes to anxiety. This is critical. This is arguably the most important distinction. A worry can pop into your head at anytime you can't control that there's nothing you can do about it. Right? Worrying. The act of elaborating on one of those thoughts that pop into your head is absolutely something you can control. It's hard. It's not easy. But it is definitely something especially with practice, you can get better at doing. And that really matters for anxiety. Because the thing that causes anxiety is worry. You cannot have anxiety, you can't have the emotion of anxiety without worry. First. We're the principle here is called cognitive mediation. What this means is, our thoughts mediate the relationship between what happens to us and how we feel emotionally. And so you have a thought pops into your head, right? Or someone says something nasty to you. Right? That's an event, right? The sound waves from their voice don't cause anxiety, the sound waves from their voice go in to your brain. You think about you process them cognitively. It's self talk is usually how we do it. And the interpretation of that event is what leads to the emotion. All right, sorry, I know I'm going into like school mode here, but I gotta love and you keep going, okay, for getting out of the overwhelm, actually, is being really clear on what are the types of things I'm experiencing emotions, thoughts, physical sensations, behaviors. And it's like all these things in front of me, right? I'm worrying like crazy. I'm feeling super anxious. My body is tense and stressed, right? And I'm just like, I'm kind of distracting myself avoiding all this kind of stuff. Okay, given all that's going on, what can I actually control? What can I do? Emotions, physical sensations, very little. Your thoughts and your behaviors, you actually have a lot of opportunity to make changes there. And when you make changes there, those will indirectly ended up affecting how you feel emotionally and physically. So when you're saying, I'm feeling anxious, I'm feeling overwhelmed. You know, I'm feeling I've got all this nerves. When I would ask myself and I would first say, All right, I'm just gonna write all this stuff, all the stuff I'm feeling inside, I'm gonna get it out of my head and body, and I'm unlit. I'm gonna pull out my pad of paper, a paper and a pen. And I'm just gonna write down what I'm experiencing. I'm feeling anxious, I'm feeling overwhelmed. I've got some nerves here, I'm really stressed. I'm like, I'm worrying about so and so or what's going to happen here, get it out. Then ask yourself of all this stuff. What do I have direct control over? is really, really, really important. And circle those literally, it sounds stupid, but it's really helpful. Circle those things. Like I find myself worrying about stuff, I can't control the future, right? That's causing a ton of anxiety. It's not the only thing, right? That's a big chunk of it. And that is actually something I can control. And we can talk about get into how you actually do that. But like, boom, they're worrying. If you're anxious and overwhelmed. Worrying is almost always a huge culprit. And you can almost always do a lot about it. But you would never get there if you're just totally overwhelmed. And you don't have these categories for things. If you can't, it's like a messy room. Right? If your room is just a disaster under stuff all over the place, you can't find anything, it's very hard to get worked on. But if things are ordered, and meet, you know exactly where everything is, it's much easier, not completely easy, but easier to get stuff done. So dealing with this mess of anxiety and nerves and overwhelm, you have to get clarity first. I think that's really important because it's clarity, that's going to help you figure out what are some productive things I can actually do. So anyway, that's a lot we can you tell me where you want to go more, but I think that's my, that's how I set up the problem is actually just not rushing right into like, Oh, I gotta do my breathing exercises, or, Oh, I'm gonna go meditate for five minutes. Or, you know, I remember my mantra, or I gotta, you know, Papa CBT pill or like, like, no, there's anything wrong with those things, necessarily. But it's a mistake to start doing stuff before you've slowed down and gotten clarity on what's actually going on with me. And those four buckets, I think, are a really good place to start. Yeah, emotions, thoughts, physical sensations, behaviors.

Zack Arnold: I love all of this is exactly what I wanted to dive into. I when it comes to the solutions, and especially this idea of writing down your fears, and your worries, I want to get to that in a little bit. Because you have a really interesting way to do this, like on a scheduled, which I was fascinated by. So we're gonna get there a little bit later. But the two things that I wanted to do to go a little bit deeper into this current conversation, are the value that I personally found in understanding physical sensations. And I'll just oh, this is not, you know, like clinical knowledge. This is my own personal anecdotal experience. And maybe you can help extrapolate it to you know, more amongst the larger dataset in your clinical experience. But what I've learned how to do to differentiate these three things, whether it's anxiety, overwhelm, or nerves, and that I've helped my students and my clients to do as well is, where do I feel it in the body like somatically, where am I experiencing these and the way that I experienced it is going to be different than others. But I know that if I feel like some some tightness in my chest, and I'm sweating a little bit, and my heart is beating faster, I'm scared of something. And I'm nervous, like, I get this feeling all the time when I'm trying something, a new physical challenge. And I learned this process because a little over five years ago, I decided with an award winning Dad Bod and two kids, I'm going to be an American Ninja Warrior. Wow, like every single week, at least once or twice. Here's the situation. I have no idea how I got myself into this. What am I doing here? So I very acutely know what those nerves feel like, right? It's butterflies, it's like the butterflies in the nerves. To me, anxiety is this giant black pit in my stomach, very different from the nerves, once I break it down physically, in overwhelm, just feels like this giant 800 pound weight that's sitting on top of me. So I can't like physically extrapolate what those actually look like. And nobody could test me for them. But I have this visualization. So I know which of the three I'm feeling in my own body.

Nick Wignall: Okay, let me ask you, I've got a theory to share. But I want to ask you first, why do you think that works? That idea to like, go into your body as the first move when you're feeling all this stuff? Like what what's the, what's the actual mechanism there? That's helpful, do you think?

Zack Arnold: Okay, so I have no idea. Let me preface it by saying I have no clue. But I also have a hypothesis that I don't even know if it's going to be in our lifetimes. But I think we're going to discover that our body has a separate brain and nervous system separate from this giant thing that we have inside our heads that we don't even understand that's a totally separate thinking. mechanist Some from what we currently think of where we think and we're, we're conscious, and we're cognitive, whether that's in the gut, whether that's in a, you know, some other nervous system that we don't even understand. But I think we're going to find that there's both much more integration between body and mind. But then paradoxically, way more separation. I don't know, I don't even really know how to explain that. There. There's so much about our bodies and our nervous systems and our brains that we just don't understand. We think we do. But I don't think we do. Like it a certain point in history, we were so sure that the Earth was flat, like this is just fact, it just is what it is. Until it wasn't. And I think our understanding of all the thinking happens in the brain, and the body is for moving. It's just we're Meat Puppets with a brain attached to it. I don't think that's true at all. But if I if somebody were to say, we'll explain that further, I have no idea how to do that, because I don't think anybody does.

Nick Wignall: I love that. I think the one of the ways I think about that kind of dilemma that you're explaining is that we're very Inside Out creatures, right? It's right, and what's in my head, and then like, where do I go moving outwards? You know, my brain doing things and affecting the world. But I think what we're less sensitive to and aware of is the reverse, how does the world how does my body influence my brain, which then, of course, influences how I interact with the world again, but I think that it's a two way street. And we're very familiar with one one lane of the street, and very ignorant of the other way. So I'm, I, I, yeah, I would put money on your hypothesis. I think there's a lot there. So what's your theory? Yeah, so one, and this is a very mundane, and I'm not saying this is the only explanation. But I think it's actually really powerful, which is, when you go into your body like that, what you're doing it, it's, it's more about what you're not doing, than what you are doing. And so if you go into your body, and you say like, Okay, where am I experiencing this anxiety? And you're saying, yeah, like my stomach, I've got this big black hole that's like, I feel like I have this pit in my stomach, right? Or I've got all this like shoulder tension. And like, if you if you stop and what I was just saying, if you analyze that thought content, it's decidedly non judgmental. It's descriptive. You're simply describing what is you're not in. And most importantly, you're not doing time traveling, you're in the present, your mind is not projecting forward to the future or reaching back to the past. And those two things, worry about future rumination about the past. Those that's like gasoline on the fire, have difficult emotions, when you're feeling anxious, and then you start catastrophizing about the future, and what it means what's going to happen about your anxiety is gonna go through the roof. But so when you go into your body, and you're, you're just describing what you're feeling, you are not catastrophizing, worrying, you're not going into your head spinning, making those emotions more intense and frequent. So I actually think that's one of the secrets to this, this sort of technique that a lot of us have stumbled upon of going into the body, whatever that looks can take a variety of different forms. But I think, yeah, I think it has to do in a lot of ways it has to do with what you're preventing yourself from doing. Because, again, that the thoughts stuff, right, the worrying about the future, the self criticism, the judgment about oh, I shouldn't be feeling anxious right now, or what's going to happen? What are people thinking of me being and all that kind of stuff, that your, your anxiety gets exponentially more intense, when you're doing all that come? So you give yourself a respite, when you go into your body? Yeah, that's, that's one of my little theories on that.

Zack Arnold: I love that. And I think that there, obviously, there's so much research and 1000s of years of spirituality, about this idea of being in the present, not looking at the past or the future. And just to bring it back to what we're talking about. Now, to use your analogy. If you're, you know, you're on your your local softball team, and this is the championship series, and it's the bottom of the ninth and you're going up to the plate, it's impossible to be worried about the job interview you have in two weeks, because you're so completely consumed with the adrenaline rush of the present. And what I have found through all of my Spartan racing and Ninja Warrior Training, is that it drastically reduces my anxiety because it forces me to be in the present with good fear, right? These nerves and oh my god, what I'm going to jump off of a 20 foot plank into like, dirty, muddy water and I have to swim to a car on it. I'm not thinking, gee, is that person gonna respond to my outreach email? Right? There's no room for that. So it allows me to really differentiate those and there's so much value to being the president. So yeah, we're totally on the same page there. The next area that I want to get into is one you've touched upon already, then I want to make sure that we get to a couple of these strategies. But the next one that I think is so fundamental to both the work that you're doing and intersects perfectly with the work that I'm doing is this idea of values and I entity, as we see in both our economy, whether it's with technology, whether it's just with the current jobs market, but just a much, much bigger picture, what I've been saying, really since the beginning of the pandemic, and now with what I've been calling COVID, 2.0, which I didn't realize how apropos that is, because I'm now seeing all these things about new variants and masks, and like, maybe I shouldn't call this COVID 2.0. And maybe this is my fault. But the point being that I think this is an identity crisis that all of us are collectively going through as a culture, which is that we've spent generations assigning what we do to who we are. And I think that a lot of that is what creates the misalignment of my work to who I really am and my values, but we don't consciously see it. So I want to talk a little bit more about the work that you do with values, and how we can identify those values. And that can help us reduce the anxiety or the worry, or all the other things we've talked about, because values is a core part of work that you do.

Nick Wignall: Sure. Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, one, one, the frame I usually take, when I start thinking about values and how it intersects with identity is one, you can tell them that I'm a Distinguished or I like making distinctions among things. But when you think about values, you can think about inherited versus acquired values. So we all inherit values from our parents, from our grandparents, from culture, from our faith tradition, from our, you know, our school, like whatever, we especially when we're young, right, we just absorb, like, we absorb language and all sorts of things. We absorb values, like what is good, you know, going to school and going to college and getting a degree that's good, right? That's a value. Is it objectively, a good thing? I don't know, that's like for the philosopher, right? But our culture has basically are a lot a big portion of our culture has said, that's a, that's a value. And you should pursue that, right? A value is like an ideal, or principle, right? It's kind of like the, like, the North Star is like the metaphor, right? And so like the North Star, you should head towards the North Star, right? Now, there's nothing necessarily wrong with inherited values, right? I think they can be really good. They can be really good. Again, good, the tricky word. I tend to like helpful, rather than good, good gets kind of moralistic and not that that's bad. But it can be, depending on your background, it can be can be tricky, but is a particular value that you've inherited. Is it helpful to you in your current life? Right now? I think that right, there is actually a really powerful question. And it's worth thinking about inherited, what values have I inherited, from my culture, from my family, from my religion, like whatever it is, right? Now, the other type of values are acquired or chosen values. This is where and we've probably already done this already. You're, you know, in your first job, you have a supervisor, or a manager or a boss, and you just like, you admire the hell out of them. And you admire them for some specific quality or value right there. Their work ethic is just unbelievable, right? And you came from a culture that didn't, you know, wasn't anti work ethic, but didn't, that wasn't a big thing. And now you're like, Wow, this is incredible, right? Or you start dating someone who is just profoundly compassionate. It's not that you didn't like compassion before, like, who's gonna say compassion, it's not important. But you've seen like, the value of someone who's truly like, lives out compassionate and decided, like, I want that, that's really important to me, I'm going to try and start living my life more in accordance with that, with that value, right. So these are two ways that we kind of come upon values. And I think it's important to keep those clear. Like I said, one thing to be careful of is just taking an inventory of your VAT, because you probably have tons of values that you aren't even super aware of, that are still having an influence on your life on the decisions you make on how you feel about things on your identity. And so a really simple way getting really practical here, you can just Google personal values list, there's tons of them, like I have one James clear as a really good one, that they're all over the place, right? And all it is, there's no like, correct List of 100 personal data that like, you know, 100 different people create 100 different lists, than they'd all have some similarities and differences. That's not the point. The point is, there's a list of all sorts of values, things like courage, compassion, creativity, hard work, you know, like, whatever, all these ideals. And what's really useful is to just spend a little time with that list. And so one thing you can do is you just go through, and you might do a pass saying, which of these values do I have that I've inherited from my family? Or from my culture? Which of these values have I sort of chosen and acquired myself? Right isn't the is another one, like sorting those out? You can also just make a list of like, which ones intrigued you like Oh, come on. Really, and really thought about that one before, are ones that make you feel a little conflicted, like I was talking somebody recently who did one of these what their values list, and they saw the word patriotism. And they were like, oh, that's an interesting one. Like, I, I want to be patriotic, but I feel conflicted about it too. And like, I don't know, I feel this interesting, like poll with that one. Like, what's that about?

Zack Arnold: That's a loaded word right now.

Nick Wignall: Yeah, totally. Right, like, but that's, but that's interesting. Because what that what that pole is, is a symptom of is that there's something inside of you, right? That is, there's a strong connection there. And if you don't bring awareness to that connection, is going to influence you, whether you realize it or not. And so a lot of this is about becoming more aware of what are the values in my life that are kind of operating, where you can leave out, like, think about, like apps on your computer, like, before I got on this podcast, I was like, you had very clear, nice instructions about, you know, make sure you don't have 400, internet tabs open and make sure you don't have Google Drive running in the background, because that's gonna, those things, they're helpful in one circumstance, right. But if you're trying to record a podcast, they're gonna slow everything down, they're gonna muck everything up, they're not going to be really useful. But to do that, you have to listen, you prompted me, you have to literally take inventory of what are those things? What are those values running in the background? For me? And then and how are they influencing me? Right, so my, my value of hard work, right, I was raised in a family that really valued hard work, I think largely, that's a really good thing, you know, there's all these sort of areas of my life, my work, my creative life, where hard work has been super beneficial. But, and this is, this is the really uncomfortable thing to come to terms with is, values come in conflict with each other, even like, core values. So two of my like, really, core values are hard work, and what I call presence, which is, you know, you know, those people where you, you talk to them, and they have this extraordinary capacity to really be present. Like they're fully there with you completely. They're not most people are mostly present, but there's still like, 10% of their brain that's like on something else, right? There's fine, like, I'm like that most people are like that. But there are those amazing people out there, who sometimes are just fully with you. And that, like presence is, especially with kids, like now that I have kids, that's such an important value to me is like being really trying to really, truly be present with them. But here's the thing, like hard work and presence, often conflict with each other. Like, I'm so passionate about my work, that it's very easy for me to find myself. Like I'm laying on the carpet, playing blocks with my two year old, right cars, he loves cars. And I'm kind I'm like mindlessly playing with the blocks. But I'm thinking about my next blog post I'm gonna write, or I'm thinking about how I blew that answer that sack asked me that question, I completely missed it and like, like, what that's that it's, it's not a bad thing. It's, I have a value of hard work, right. And so it's my brain following that value. But it's conflicting with this other value that I have, which is presence. So I think that's a really key idea is to, you can go through a personal values list, identify the really big ones for you. Like the core core values, whatever you want to call them, there's maybe five, six of them, that are like the really big ones that you want to sort of guide your life. But the really the next level, the really next level move is to say, pick two of them and say, when do these two values come into conflict in my life? Like what and then what do I typically do when they come into conflict? Does one tend to win out over the other one? Why might that be? What are some things I could do? So this idea of, yeah, thinking about values complex, and then being very mindful and intentional about that you can't have your cake and eat it too. Sometimes your values are going to conflict, you're going to have to make a decision, what you will end up following one or the other. You might just do it mindlessly. Better, though, if you could have spent some time reflecting on those conflicts, so that you can be really intentional about it. Like when I'm playing with my kids on Saturday, and I get this hard work conflict with presidents, I'm going presents every time it's going to be hard. Maybe I'm thinking maybe I'm like really cranking on a good idea for a new blog post or something. I'm dropping my values to those two coming conflict I'm picking presents each time. So having a It's not enough to know your values, even your core values. You have to be able to prioritize your values given certain circumstances. And I think that's it's to me, that's that's not talked nearly enough about we don't we don't like the idea that we have to pick but like life will make you pick and you can either be intentional and thoughtful about it, or you can be kind of reactive about it. And so on. Love the exercise of of looking at those values conflicts and thinking through? What do I want to do when those values conflict?

Zack Arnold: It's very clear to me now, why my team member Julie, read your newsletter and said, Oh, my god, stop everything and get Nick on our podcast. Because it's for over half of this conversation, my assumption is, you literally must be reading everything that I write because you're just hitting the nail on the head word so much in alignment. And the thing that is just ringing all of these bells for me right now, I've been having this conversation for years about the term work life balance. And I have yet to completely solve this. But whenever somebody asked me, you know, how do you get more work life balance? And I say you're asking the wrong question. I think the term is severely flawed, like, well, what should it be instead? I'm not totally confident I have the answer. But my current answer has been for years, what we need to work towards is more work life presents. When I'm on the job, I'm doing the job. When I'm with my kids, and with my kids, right, you can have work life balance, where you work 40 hours a week, and you're with your kids 40 hours a week just to make the math even, I can't imagine 40 hours a week with your kids. Like all the moms out there, I don't know how you do it, right. But let's just do the math, we say they're perfectly balanced on the scale. If I'm at work all day long thinking about my kids, and how much I hate my job. And if I'm with my kids, thinking about the next blog post, or the next email, I have 0% Work Life presence and 100% work life balance. And I think presence is such an undervalued skill, especially with how distracted we are with social media. And we're overworking 24/7. And the value that we have towards work is so completely ridiculously skewed. versus the rest of our life. I've always said that work life presence is what I want to work towards more, which is really, really challenging. But what I want to zoom into even further, and if you want to pull on that thread, you can if we want to go deeper into this, I'll kind of let you choose. And I think you'll have a really good way to blend both together. But what what I often teach as far as actual strategies and tactics in my program, there are two areas. There are several where I specialize the two that I really help people with a lot are time management and financial management. And it's never about Well, here are the time blocks, you're here the numbers you here's how to be more efficient there. Here's how the spreadsheets work. That's all part of it. But the bigger question that I always ask. And this one, just this is like digging the knife into the wound for everybody is how you spend your time in alignment with your values is how you're spending your money in alignment with your values, and how do you change your story. So both of those are in alignment with your values. And I think to me, this is the heart of why we're having an identity crisis. Because how we spend our time is not in alignment with our values.

Nick Wignall: Yeah, I love that. I was just watching my wife and I were just watching the show. You know, Ramit. Oh, you've had Ramit on the podcast, right?

Zack Arnold: Ramit Ramit is my mentor and the reason I have a business. Yes. Actually, yes. He's a friend of mine. And I've known Ramit for years and years. And you? Yeah, you'll I've we could talk about Ramit for hours. But he's he's literally the reason that I'm here and have a business. So

Nick Wignall: So his concept of your rich life, right? I mean, that's, that's, that's his term for your value, like all of these, like, the minutiae of your financial situation and budgets, and like, you know, rent versus buy, blah, blah, blah, all. So I feel like so much you could kind of, if you had to distill Ramit down into like, a little bit, it's like, all of those things should only be decided on in the context of your value, like having clarity about what you actually want out of life, what really matters to you. And importantly, not in this just like big abstract, like, I have to have one value, that's true forever, no, like, your, your situation is going to change. And so there's this, like meta skill, I think of being adaptable with those values, right, and knowing that, like, you know, what my values as a 22 year old, fresh out of college are probably some of them are probably similar, there's gonna be a lot of differences to my values as a 38 year old with four little kids, right? Those are just like really different life situations. And so I'm going to need to update that value system, my rich life and roommates terms, like whatever that is, that's a normal process. And so again, it goes back to this, like, you know, values work is not you'll sit down once and like, fill out a spreadsheet or you know, fill out a worksheet or go through your values list. It's something that should always be sort of on the back of our minds that we're, we're constantly updated. Like, just like you keep your computer updated with like the latest software, right? Values work is something that I think we want to continually go back to, and be continued to be mindful of. Because it's just, it's just so important. It's it sets the trajectory for everything else, whether we're talking about finances, or whether we're talking about Oh my god, I'm like overwhelmed with anxiety. What do I do? That is a values question that is absolute, like your values, you don't want, you don't want your emotions to completely dictate that decision. You want them to inform it, right? But you need your values to make a good decision about how to proceed in the face of ambiguity, uncertainty, anxiety, overwhelm, all that sort of thing. To me, I'm with I could talk about values for too long.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, we're gonna need to schedule seven more of these. I think as you and I, I've gotten through about three sentences of five pages worth of prep work. So this could take a while I'll be conscious of your time today. But I, I have a feeling there will be either more off the record and or more on the record conversations in the future. Because I feel like I've definitely found a kindred spirit. One, one further thing that I want to hit a little bit even harder. And I'm so glad you brought it over Ramit. I never in a million years thought we were going to talk about Ramit Sethi on this podcast. But there's something that that I have to distinguish that I think is so important to this conversation and values. And it actually comes from a really random conversation that I had with my family and my son. And my son is in middle school. And I don't remember it was maybe a month or two ago. And he was talking to his his grandparents on my in laws. And he had said something about oh, yeah, well, Dad has this book on his shelf about how to get rich, right talking about Ramit's book, right. Yeah. And I said, there's a huge distinction about books about how to get rich, and how to be rich, right. And poor Ramit he didn't he knows that when he does. When he picked the name of his business. He's like, boy, did I dig a hole for myself, right? Because it just sounds like it's another one of these scammy things. But you get to know him better. And it's about how to be rich. And the point is, you can be rich at any time. It's all about a perspective, it's about a state of mind. And it's about your values, not about how do I acquire more wealth, or more money or more success. He's the antithesis of all of that. On the flip side, he will also teach you how to do all of the above, right, but it's about how can I be rich now as opposed to how do I get rich. And that, to me is such an important distinction, especially for people in the entertainment industry, where the definition of success, the outward definition, is that you need the Oscar or you need the me or you need to have all these credits or whatever it might be, or you need to acquire the house and the nice car. And until we've done that reached the destination, right that that within we haven't been successful yet. But that's often in misalignment with our values, which as we're coming back to the core idea, misalignment of your values is what causes the anxiety. So there's two practical strategies that I want to walk away with, of which there are a million and a half more if anybody joins your newsletter or learns about the work that you're doing. But I want to, I always like to leave people action steps, it's really important to me that somebody is at least something they can leave with. So the two things which are both kind of a, they're both habits, and they're both reflective processes. Number one, how often should we and how do we reflect on our values? And also, how often can we reflect on our worries and make it systematic because this is something really interesting and unique that you share? Which is that you plan both of these. So talk a little bit more about these two strategies.

Nick Wignall: Yeah. I, you know, first of all, I'm kind of an experimentalist. So I said, like, I think the real answer is you're gonna have to experiment a little bit and figure out what works for your life. And, but I think what's important is that there is a consistent cadence with value. So like, quarterly, you could do it, you could set up a, you know, an hour at the, you know, every quarter or something, it doesn't have to be a ton of time, right. But I think just that there's so that there's some, it's, it's like the dentist, you just booked the appointment and just you go every time you know, you don't think too much about it, you set it and forget it, you know, you get on the schedule, and it's just something that it's important to you. So don't leave it up to thinking and decision making make it automatic, like other repeatable thing with money too, right? Like, just like systematize everything aboard. So I think so build in some time, and then also don't like you don't get rigid about it. Like I think that values are, you know, there's there's no like five step framework that's gonna, like, give you all the answers. What matters is just that you spend time around them. And that like the sound that sounds so dumb, but that like the answers will emerge from that. It's about quality time if you were to read that book, The Five Love Languages. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So like, it's my, it's the book I like, I hate to love, right. It's so corny. And it's so like, it's cheesy that the, you know, the photo on the cover and, but it's profound, like it's so profound, the core idea so profound, anyway, but the idea of quality time, like, in some ways, I think that's like the master love language. Like everything else comes out of quality time. And we know that quality time is so important with other people, right? Our kids, our spouses, our parents, like with art or even our coworkers, right. But it's worth asking how much quality time Do I spend myself do I give to myself, including to really important parts of myself, like my values? So I, you know, like, I started, I can't stop talking about red meat, but like when people ask them about budgeting, he's got this great way of saying like, yes, you need to be thinking about your your budget, but like, there's a few core things you need to focus on and like, don't get lost in the weeds. Right? You don't need 82 spreadsheets like to track every, like, focus on the big stuff, right and get those right. And you won't have to worry about the tiny stuff. So I think there's something similar with values, like I don't worry too much about, what am I doing, you know, like all the data, but what's important is that you're carving out time to reflect on them. And you can do that, like, you can just journal about them, right? What one I think really nice, something I do I try to do is, each quarter, I'll pick one value to focus on, it'd be like my focus, value, and I do something dumb, like, Oh, I'll get a like sticky note. And I'll just like put it on it with that value written on it, just so that I'm reminded of it. I think something as simple as that, what, what matters is that you do it, like that's much more important that you do it perfectly well, what matters is you do it consistently. So that's, that's what I would say, schedule something quarterly, half an hour, sit down with a values list. And then if you want pick one to be like your focus value, that you want to like think about and be more intentional about for the next whatever quarter month, whatever cadence you work for you.

Zack Arnold: I love that I'm going to add a little bit to this and that I want to make sure we get to this idea of scheduling your anxiety, which is a brilliant concept. I don't know if you realize this, but you have an entire book, if not a series with that one sentence, maybe you know that already. But when it comes to this idea of values, one of the exercises that I take my state, my students who are very early in my program, is once they set a goal, there's this idea of well, the goal is Mount Everest. And there are certain qualities that I need to identify with in order to get there that I don't feel I possess. So it's not just a matter of here are the values or how I identify, here's how I need to identify if I'm going to achieve what feels like an insurmountable goal. So I have them pick these three words, that would be values like I'm, I'm confidence, or I'm relentless, or I'm focused, whatever it might be. And it's exactly like you said, take the post, its put it on the side of your computer, put it on your refrigerator set automations on your phone, I have my students have them texted to themselves. They're like, This is dumb, like, really, like, I know, the fourth time I got the text message that I'm gonna get these words, and I ignore it. And then a month later, they're like, holy shit, like, this crazy stuff actually works. And I'm starting to actually feel like I have these qualities and like, see, right, there's a lot more going on subconsciously than we understand.

Nick Wignall: I love that. It makes me think too, that the other, I think it's important not to get too philosophical and fuzzy without like values or just on one level, they should just be very utilitarian and useful. So going back to anxiety, if there are certain situations where you tend to get kind of stuck in anxiety, like maybe you're thinking about a career move, right? But every time you get into it, you just get kind of overwhelmed with anxiety, that is like a huge signal that a value could be really useful. So it's worth asking you if you have really sticky emotional situations, a great question to ask yourself, pull up your values list and say, of my value, especially my core values, which one could be the most helpful in this situation? Like if I was really mindful and attuned to that value? And why it's important in my life? In that moment, that's really hard. I betcha you would deal with a lot better. If that value was Oh, my God. Yeah. And that difficult situation. That's, that's one of the terrible things about anxiety is that it, we get a tunnel vision, right. And all we care about is like, I can't feel this anxious anymore. I have to not feel anxious. And it goes back to the story about my wife, like, what she helped me do is say like, like, I mean, growth is one of my core values. And like, taking this new job, this is a huge growth opera, you're gonna be able to learn so much. It's gonna like, you have so many new ideas, you're gonna meet so many new people. And I was like, yes, sold. My I'm still anxious as hell. Right? But my values are now out competing that anxiety and allowing me to move forward. So I think bringing values out of the clouds, and in a very utilitarian way, bringing them to bear on some thorny, gnarly, emotional situation can be super helpful.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I love this. And we're gonna get to this idea of scheduling anxiety, because there's no way I'm letting you go until I understand it. But I want to add to I want to add to this first, and I want to make sure that my interpretation is correct, because I had at least one aha moment in the last five minutes. So I'm just going to break this down from my own personal perspective. Hopefully, it's helpful for the rest of my audience. I know that there are two words that are incredibly important to me as values and their presence and their patience. And it would seem to me that those two work really well together, but I just thought of an instance where they very much conflict and how I can use this out of the clouds and make it practical, right? Because I value presence, I often get very impatient with my family when they're on their phones. And that's an area where I know the presence is important. And I stand by it, and I'm not going to diminish that value. But if I bring a third value in, which is one that I struggle with, which is compassion, there's probably an emotional reason that they're drawn to their phones. And if I want to practice the value of patience, when they're not being present, well, that requires a little bit of compassion. Am I interpreting this correctly?

Nick Wignall: I love it. You're thinking like a behavioral psychologist, it's called functional analysis means any quote unquote, bad behavior. There's a reason why someone's getting something out of it. In combat, like compassion is one way of saying that you're being compassionate when you're, they're not just they're not trying to be rude or not present, right? That's not the intention there. And they're getting something out of it. Right, whether it's excitement, or novelty, or connection or something, right. And tuning into that, and just taking a breath and realizing that, yeah, that's I think that's the a great setup for boat, like you said, both patience and presence.

Zack Arnold: I love it. Alright, this is great. I'm gonna It's funny, because I think in another life, I was meant to be a functional behaviorist and a psychologist and a sociologist. Because what I found over the years, and this is not a tangent, this is directly related to this idea of things that you value, especially with career transitions. And I've talked about this a few times before. But I found that when I spent most of my life identifying as an editor, that's all that I did, literally from nine years old, to VHS players hit play, hit record, and learning the craft, learning the process telling stories, and then all of a sudden, a 35 height of my career. What if I don't just want to be this one thing anymore. And I want to be a present dad, or I want to have the freedom to earn income and other ways. And I had this massive identity crisis. And I realized that my values were so skewed towards this one identity. And then as I started to make the transition, I realized that it wasn't just a matter of starting over, that I had these values that made me really good as an editor. And what it really was more than anything, is my obsession with human behavior and why people do what they do. I love that. And then as I started to make the transition to what I'm doing now, I've realized that I had all the traits of what I think draws people to be psychologists or sociologists or behaviorist, like all of the authors that I put on pedestals, like Michael Jordan and LeBron James, they're all obsessed with human behavior and why how we think right, so that it was finding those connections in those values that helped me deal with the pivot and the anxiety of the career transition, and not thinking I'm starting over who do I think I am to do this totally new thing. It was about identifying with the values and the things that I'm interested in and, and the the intersection of those that helped me through it.

Nick Wignall: I love it. It just made me I had to pull this up. Because what you're saying reminded me of one of my favorite quotes by the great psychiatrist, Carl Jung, he said, every transformation demands as its precondition, the ending of a world, the collapse of an old philosophy of life. And I I love that so much because it, it totally reframes crisis, identity crisis from the end, like, this is it this is the big one. There's no coming back from this, too. It's just it's the beginning, like it's a new is the doorway to a new beginning. Right, a crisis. And it's hard in the moment. It's hard. It's easy for us to talk about that. But like, in the moment when you're scared shitless it's hard to like feel that. But I really think that is so true. And like to your point like it is it is so profoundly true. So,

Zack Arnold: Yeah and I think I think it's worth every single person that's listening right now. They're in the epicenter of that. Yeah, like, right, sure. Sounds nice. You're in the middle of it. And that's, that's kind of where everybody is, including me. So I've teased this multiple times, I don't want to have to tease it anymore. There's a very practical exercise that you teach that I really think is like the kernel of something that could be so much larger, but it's this crazy concept of scheduling my anxiety. Talk to me about what this means.

Nick Wignall: Yeah, well, I'm gonna I'm gonna gently correct you actually first because it nodule sharply because I'm persnickety, but because of that, it's actually core to that exercise. Scheduled worry. Okay, back to what we talked about with like, the distinction between emotions and thoughts. And one of the core distinctions is, you can't control your emotions, which and the implication is you cannot schedule your vote. You can't like, define a time and say like, Alright, I'm gonna do anxiety at this time, or I'm gonna do

Zack Arnold: I'm gonna be I'll be gonna be sad tonight. Right? Yeah.

Nick Wignall: Well, so you can indirectly do that. And that's part of the idea but sketch so scheduled worry. The idea here is that I'll give you the nutshell version. You make a time you schedule a time to worry on purpose. And as a result, you are going to feel fairly anxious, probably not as anxious as you're anticipating you hear that idea? You're like, well either how would I schedule time to be, this is gonna make me even more anxious than I already am. But what you do so you might say, okay, every every evening at 745, after I put the kids to bed, but before my wife and I watch a show for the evening or something like that, I'm gonna sit down and for 15 minutes, I'm going to get out my like a legal pad, not a fancy journal, just get like a legal pad, it can be, you know, scraps of paper, whatever. And I'm going to sit down, and I'm literally, I'm just going to brain dump, every single word I can think of, I'm going to transcribe it onto paper. Now this is this is critical here, you are not solving your worries, you're literally just pulling them out of your head, and you're putting them down on paper. It's like a word or two, maybe a sentence that most don't worry about grammar, spelling, all that kind of stuff, you're just literally pulling it out of your head, and putting it down on paper. And it's, it's anything, it's everything from, again, I forgot to get bananas at the grocery store to nuclear war.

Zack Arnold: By the way, I highlighted this phrase because I literally laughed out loud when I read it, like, I forgot the bananas and nuclear war, it was the perfect encapsulation of this.

Nick Wignall: And they might be side by side, they might show up right right after it. That's totally okay, the brain has a crazy place sometimes. So you're just getting it all down. But you're only doing it for your scheduled amount of time. You're either you know, 10 minutes is what sometimes what I recommend 15 minutes, it's usually somewhere in there, you're writing them down pen and paper, don't do a computer, do a pen and paper, get them all down, right. When your time is up, set a timer, when your time is up, you take your paper, you rip it off, you throw it away, not do anything with them, then you you go about your day, you can especially in the beginning, it can be a little intense against usually not as intense as you're imagining in your head being. But you can wait one things you can do is you can plan a what I call a calming exit ritual. So you can plan on my weird things is like I like washing the dishes, I find it kind of like soothing and calming. And so,

Zack Arnold: Teach me teach me that Sunday.

Nick Wignall: When I do scheduled worry, and I do this from I don't I don't do it all the time now. But if I'm going through a particularly stressful time in my life, I just I do scheduled work. Like that's my thing. I just do it. And but I always plan I often plan to like do the dishes afterwards, because it kind of like takes me down out of it or you know, you watch a show or something like that. So that's what you do. That's it. That's the whole thing. It's not more complicated than that. And you do that you do it every day, you got to do it daily. I used to give more wiggle room on this. But like it's most effective when you do it daily, and you do it for at least a few weeks. Like any habit or skill. Like you can't have asset, you got to really commit to it and do it if you want to see results. Now what why does this work. And I kind of worked into this backwards describing what it was before I describe what it is why it works and why it's important. The idea is normally you're you're worried brain, it's like a crazy toddler that's just like rambunctious and like has the run of the house totally spoiled. No rules, just like does whatever it wants all the time. Right. So you're sitting in the middle, you're working on, you know writing an article, or you're creating a presentation or you're giving a speech or whatever you're doing. And like all of a sudden your worry brain like pops up and starts worrying about nuclear war or the bananas or whatever it is right, or losing your job or you know, whatever it could be. What you've got here is worry is intruding all over your life, it just thinks it can pop up and like hijack your brain whenever it wants. Now the reason it thinks this not to blame the victim. But most of us when a worry pops into our head, we indulge it, we keep worrying, a worry showed up which we didn't control. But then we worried we kept worrying about it. And what this does is when you give attention to things in your brain, just like toddlers, the more attention you give them, the more the behavior repeats. So when a worry pops into your brain, and you immediately go, oh my god, yeah, we should think more about that. Right? I should put everything aside and like worry like hell about this thing. Right? What not only are you making yourself anxious in the moment, but you are training your brain to do more of that intrusive worry all the time. And when you're worrying constantly, you're going to be constantly anxious. That's what leads to this like, low level constant anxiety. It's worry you've, you've unintentionally trained your brain, but it's okay to bombard you whenever it wants with where it's like that annoying coworker who just like pops in all the time and is constantly like interrupting. They're well intentioned, but they're a pain in the ass and they get in the way of actually like getting on with your life. So what scheduled scheduled worry fundamentally is about it's about putting healthy boundaries, on your own mind, on your minds, tendency to worry. But it's about retraining those words. It's not the content of the worry does not matter at all. What you're doing is by carving out a specific time and rewarding your brain For worrying at that time, you're saying, hey, brain, this is the time to worry. And then all those other times, I'm not going to indulge it. I'm not going to give it attention. What you're doing there, it's like, the other metaphor is, it's like, like housebreaking a new puppy. When you first get a puppy, they're adorable. And they're sweet. And they're so Oh, they're so cute. And then they poop on your living room floor. Not so sweet. But here's the thing. When your puppy poops on living floor, you can't tell your puppy not to poop on the living room floor, you get it? You know, that's really disrespectful and kind of messy. And I don't like this, you should stop the puppies just going to look up at you cute little brown eyes, right? Same with worry, your brain is worrying making you anxious. You can't just say you know, brain, please stop worrying. Doesn't work that way. You can't tell it to stop worrying, you have to train it to top. So how do you train a puppy to stop pooping in the middle of you know, the lawn or you can't whack it on the nose of the newspaper like that stuff doesn't work. If you ask any dog trainer, what you do is you create a space where it's okay for them to do their business. And you reward the hell out of them for doing it in the right place. And a side effect of that is they do way less of it in the wrong place. So scheduled worry is applying that exact same principle. From dog training to our own minds, you create a time for worry, and when you really commit to it. And committing means two things it means when you have scheduled every time you worry like hell, during that scheduled worry time you get all those worries out. Right? You put them on paper. But then the second half of it is when it's not your scheduled worry time you maintain those good boundaries on the word you say you know what, this is hard. I've got this worry, I want it I can feel my brain wanting to elaborate on this worry. I'm not going to do it. I have my scheduled worry time. I appreciate you brain I'm sure you're just trying to help. I'll get to you tonight during scheduled worry. And you do that. And I promise you I've never seen it's probably the most effective technique I've ever experienced in all of clinical psychology. It is so powerful, it's really helpful to it's helpful for all of anxiety. It's really helpful though, if you have a lot of worry and anxiety at night, you have trouble sleeping because worried anxiety. This is a this will be a game changer is so so helpful. It's so helpful. I created my own little like mini website for it. It's called scheduled worry.com. And it just goes through the basic instructions. So you guys can check it out if you want. It's really, it's just, there's no shenanigans today. It's a really simple website. But it's such a profoundly helpful exercise. For any situation where you just feel kind of overwhelmed with a lot of anxiety and worry, it's all about putting good boundaries on your worry brain and training it to be better behaved, doesn't mean you're going to have any worries, right or your anxiety is gonna magically disappear. But there's such a big difference between housebroken dog and a non housebroken dog. And there's such a big difference between sort of a well trained mind, and a mind that is just sort of used to running wild all over the house upstairs. So I would really encourage, like, check this out. And I should say, This is not my it's an adaptation of an older technique. 50 years ago, there's guy named Tom Borg. In fact, it was a famous psychologist, he was one of the early pioneers in generalized anxiety. And he came up with a version of this, this idea of scheduled worry and kind of creating time for work. There's all sorts of sub variants. And but it's, it's, it's really helpful. So did I cover everything, did I, you know, so,

Zack Arnold: You covered it perfectly. And there's somebody that's been training a puppy for the last year and a half, I can relate to this on such a deep level. And there's just there's one other tiny thing that I want to add on to this, and I want to make sure to let you go because we're already over time. But this, this has been tremendously valuable. And I've learned a ton. I've taken more notes on this show than I've taken in months, so many things I want to get into. But do going further along this line of the puppy training and what I've learned from that and how that applies to understanding anxiety and also understanding failure. There's this concept, I don't know what it's called in your field, but it's called Target fixation. And the example would be like, for me, the thought in my mind when I was training and I was competing, a Ninja Warrior, is that if you get wet, like if you fall off an obstacle, if there's any water at all, you failed, right? So it's don't get wet. Don't get wet, don't get wet, but your brain hears get wet, get wet, right? It doesn't understand the negative part of it. And the interesting thing that because I was learning about target fixation, the same time I was training a dog, it's like saying to your dog, we're not going to go for a walk. We're not going to go for a walk. all they hear is Walk, walk, walk, and they get all excited, right? And I feel like what you're talking about is the same thing where it's like, worry, worry, worry, like, Oh, stop worrying. Stop worrying and all your brain hears is let's work Are you bored? Right? So the, as soon as you mentioned the puppy, I'm like, Yeah, I've I've learned more about life and habit formation and behavior from training a puppy than from years of podcasting and reading books. It's just now I get it.

Nick Wignall: Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing.

Zack Arnold: So having said all that want to be very, very conscious of your time, we're going to make sure that people have links to the scheduled worry.com. But more importantly, for anybody that wants to learn more about your work, they want to subscribe to your newsletter and they want to just find you and interact with you. Where should we send people?

Nick Wignall: Yeah, the newsletter is definitely the best place to go. It's thefriendlymind.com, friendlymind.com Terrific, it's a it's a free weekly newsletter comes out every Monday morning. And yeah, I'd love to love to have you on.

Zack Arnold: Well, I can assure you that now that my team member has discovered you that I will definitely become a subscriber as well and thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. I can't thank you enough for your time. And I think this will have a tremendously positive benefit on everybody to listen. So thank you so much.

Nick Wignall: I hope so. Thanks for having me on.

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Learn how a simple mindfulness practice can help enhance concentration and focus, decrease anxiety, manage stress, and improve your cognitive function (all backed by science).

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